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A PHENOMENOLOGICAL TOPOLOGY OF
POSITIVE INTERPERSONAL EMOTIONS
by
John W. Carter
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(EDUCATION – COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGY)
December 2006
Copyright 2006 John W. Carter

Although there has been much recent attention paid to positive emotional states, relatively little rigor has been applied to investigating the nature of positive interpersonal emotions such as affection and desire. Emotion researchers and theorists tend to fall into one of two traps: either reducing positive interpersonal emotions to quantitative variables or abstracting these emotions into universal types and categories. None of these strategies treat the actual experience of these emotions seriously.; In order to model the experience of positive interpersonal emotions, I conducted nineteen phenomenological interviews with eight participants. The interviews focused on multiple aspects of participants' good feelings about others, and participants were given an active role in selecting which feelings to describe and in differentiating between feelings. Interviews were transcribed and subjected to iterative compare-and-contrast analyses.; Nine distinct aspects of these feeling-experiences were identified: emotional feeling, symbolic meaning, cognition, perceptual awareness, bodily sensation, motivation, behavior, target, and context. Of these, the symbolic meaning (the feeling's implication for the relation between oneself and the other person), was most important in differentiating one type of feeling from another. Participants' feelings varied in seven dimensions: intensity, depth, duration, directionality, situated/generalized, power relationship, and type of connection. 'Situated/generalized' highlighted a continuum in participants' experiences between immediate emotional reactions and long-standing, background feelings. 'Directionality' proposed a three-way distinction between feelings directed towards the other, feelings coming from the other, and feelings shared with the other. Based on these distinctions, 45 different prototypes of positive interpersonal feelings were defined.; This model expands the concept of positive interpersonal emotions in severalways. First, the subjective experience of these emotions provides essential informationabout these emotions that is not reducible to observable data. Second, the typologicalspace for these emotions is reconfigured as a fluid landscape of overlapping regionswhere boundaries are frequently crossed, blurred, and blended. Third, the domain ofpositive interpersonal emotions is extended beyond emotional reactions towards the otherto include emotions received from the other, emotions shared with the other, andemotions fading but persisting in a generalized state.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL TOPOLOGY OF
POSITIVE INTERPERSONAL EMOTIONS
by
John W. Carter
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(EDUCATION – COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGY)
December 2006
Copyright 2006 John W. Carter